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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
Hi all, we want to share more info about the reported issue with Proton Mail Bridge, our desktop IMAP/SMTP gateway to Proton Mail encrypted email. The fact that Bridge and its client can become desynchronized sporadically for some users is a high priority issue we have been working on. Bridge is open source, and as a result relies upon open-source components, and the root cause is an architectural issue in a library that Bridge uses to implement IMAP. When there are network issues, this library returns errors to email clients. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of email clients, and some email clients don’t handle errors properly, and this leads to desynchronization. Our error tracking shows this does not happen often (1-2% of Bridge users) and the symptom is usually incorrect display of messages or read/unread status which is fixed with an inbox resynchronization. There are cases where a combination of a desynchronized mailbox and a specific series of user actions can lead to accidental email deletion, but this is far rarer than desynchronization. Our implementation tries as hard as possible to avoid this. If you find you are missing an email, our implementation works around the issue by placing it in your All Mail folder, so please check there. If you believe you have an email that is accidentally deleted, please contact our support team and we will do our best to help you undelete it. As Bridge is open source, updates on this issue have always been publicly posted on GitHub. IMAP-compatible encryption is a very difficult task and Bridge must interface with many different email clients, most of which are not open-source making it almost impossible to address all cases where certain clients don’t do error handling properly. Addressing this issue at the source requires replacing the core IMAP library. Unfortunately, there is not exactly a large selection of open-source IMAP libraries to pick from. None in fact are sufficiently well maintained to ensure we don’t run into this issue again. And a commercial library does not work because of Proton’s open-source nature. Therefore, the solution is to build our own IMAP library called Gluon, which we have been focusing on since this issue was reported to us. You can follow the progress or participate in this open-source effort here: https://github.com/ProtonMail/gluon
Yeah, this really need attention now. I'm spotting the go-imap (which seems to be the real culprit) replacement being worked on, which is great! But, u/ProtonMail and u/bartbutler, please push all you can internally.